A System-on-Chip Solution for Point-of-Care Ultrasound Imaging Systems: Architecture and ASIC Implementation

In this paper, we present a novel system-on-chip (SOC) solution for a portable ultrasound imaging system (PUS) for point-of- careapplications. The PUS-SOC includes all of the signal processing modules (i.e., the transmit and dynamic receive beamformer modules, mid- and back-end processors, and color Doppler processors) as well as an efficient architecture for hardware-based imaging methods (e.g., dynamic delay calculation, multi-beamforming, and coded excitation and compression). The PUS-SOC was fabricated using a UMC 130-nm NAND process and has 16.8 GFLOPS of computing power with a total equivalent gate countof 12.1 million, which is comparable to a Pentium-4 CPU. The size and power consumption of the PUS-SOC are $27\times 27~{\rm mm}^{2}$ and 1.2 W, respectively. Based on the PUS-SOC, a prototype hand-held US imaging system was implemented. Phantom experiments demonstrated that the PUS-SOC can provide appropriate image quality for point-of- careapplications with a compact PDA size ( $200\times 120\times 45~{\rm mm}^{3}$ ) and 3 hours of battery life.